Note: This story is the second of a three-part series. It was updated at 3:25 p.m. Tuesday, June 5, to clarify several quotes. The first part of the series can be found here.

You’re reading this, and not even thinking about how your brain is decoding each word, or how each sentence will come together. But Lauren Freeman, Reading Department lead at Homewood-Flossmoor High School, has given a great deal of thought to this. Her efforts helped revamp the H-F reading program. The changes have been recognized by the International Literacy Association.

“What’s interesting about reading, it takes a long time for practice to catch up with research, and in the past, reading was based on what was shown to work in the classroom, or best practice,” she said.

Much has changed the past 10-plus years. Neuroscientists have used MRIs and event-related potential (ERP) measures to look at how the brain functions as one reads.

“What they found out is that we all learn to read the same way – every single one of us,” Freeman said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re 5 or 6 learning to read, or you’re 55 and learning to read, we all learn to read the exact same way. Good readers read on the left side of their brain. We take in letters through our eyes and those letters move to sounds and meaning.”

With this knowledge, H-F’s Reading Department restructured its approach to helping students become better readers. Getting kids comprehension of text was essential to their work. The switch took students and their reading specialists out of a designated reading class, and into the World History and U.S. History classes. The reading specialists are helping students find ways to grasp the history text and comprehend its meaning.

“One of the biggest challenges for our students is a lack of background knowledge—those foundational understandings that strong readers naturally draw on to make sense of text,” Freeman said. “We’re working to fill in those gaps so students can successfully engage with grade-level material.”

“When students start to learn roots, prefixes, and suffixes, they begin to develop strategies for tackling unfamiliar words,” Freeman said. “Even if they don’t know the exact meaning, they can break the word down enough to understand it in context and maintain comprehension.”

“There’s a lot of instruction in syntax and a lot of grammar (in the reading program). It’s not a canned approach. There isn’t a scripted book or guide for a reading specialist. It’s all based on the needs of the student and so some have needs of awareness fluency and a lot of other kids have challenges when it comes to language comprehension, so they struggle with the text and other skills to really help them to understand what they’re reading.”

Both Freeman and Jen Rudan, director of Student Supports, say the new model of embedding reading specialists into classrooms is working. During the 2024-25 school year, 146 students were part of the reading intervention program. For the coming school year, 72 students will continue in Tier 2, and 34 students will no longer receive reading intervention services. That’s a 23% drop.

There’s also been improvement on test scores. According to Dave Kush, assessment coordinator, reading was the highest subject test average score for H-F on the ACT, a national test administered to the junior class. Kush believes the results “speak to the work done in social science, including the co-taught social science with reading classes.”

“We knew based on the old model, we didn’t see a lot of those (reading and comprehension) skills transferring to some of the other academic areas. We didn’t see it transfer, because that’s a whole other skillset (students are learning); to take what you know from this class and transfer it to this class and not think about it,” Rudan said.

With the new model, Rudan said Freeman “knew the best way to teach these skills was to teach them alongside the core (history) subject because then they’re learning the (reading) skills and they’re learning how to transfer them to subject areas all in one.”

“She’s put so much time and energy into this,” Rudan said of Freeman who has consulted with reading professors at UCLA and Northern Illinois University “to make sure we’re on the right path… because there’s no blueprint for high school reading services. 

“Our requirements are so different from grade and middle school standards, so the amount of patience and time she’s put into this… she’s really been a trailblazer,” Rudan said.

Freeman will be sharing her findings and reading program approaches at the June 6 meeting of the Chicago International Summit on Education 2025.